Watch this space

In an earlier article I admitted to being a sceptic. For someone who works in the development field I can sometimes take time to warm to the latest and greatest shiny object. Anything that professes to make coding quicker and easier automatically raises my scepticism level. It isn’t that I love doing things the hard way, it’s just that over time I’ve seen many of these promises turn out to be nothing but vapour, disappearing before it can even settle.

There is also the situation of similar and competing technologies, see the old VHS vs Betamax story or more recently (and currently) Sass vs LESS. In web development, we like to think we are working at the coal face; it is vitally important to be up to date with developments both for our own education and to give our clients the best possible technology solution. However, I operate with the knowledge that jumping on something that is too new and untested may result in a negative for a client.

For this article I was gearing up to tell the world that I didn’t use Bootstrap, didn’t see the purpose. Then I remembered writing my previous article on Sass, and the scepticism at which I held preprocessors. So I started researching, trying to learn about the reasons not to use Bootstrap… classic confirmation bias.

Confirmation biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. Poor decisions due to these biases have been found in political and organizational contexts. – Wikipedia

I don’t like making poor decisions, so I’m going to give Bootstrap a lot more time. On every open forum about the pros and cons there is an ongoing argument, with many good points made by both sides. I see a particular area in which putting up a Bootstrap framework may result in streamlining my workflow. At Pugh Morgan we design UI to be specific to our clients custom needs, when arguing against Bootstrap we hear that the designs end up being similar.

This is where I want to challenge myself, in allowing our UX/UI team the freedom that they usually have in creating a custom interface, while using Bootstrap to rapidly build the front end. When developing a WordPress site, we use the HTML5 Blank theme. The opportunity to use Bootstrap to build upon this theme will be my starting point. Watch this space.